As for the music, it is Fair Use. This Land Is Mine is a PARODY of “The Exodus Song.” That music was sort of the soundtrack of American zionism in the 1960’s and 70’s. It was supposed to express Jewish entitlement to Israel. By putting the song in the mouth of every warring party, I’m critiquing the original song.

“That land is mine” – here is the bast tell of human history I`ve ever seen before. We can imagine some artists and scientists at the far background, and may be some civilians on the bottom but it doesn`t make any changes to the ways world runs from ancient times till today.
However the angel of death is not the main actor of the scene. He is just a representative of the power which produces another players and the curcle of life itself. We feel the small picture correctly, just as it is on the movie, and it is right. Some steps out of it, and we can see something more.
The exellent movie, as well as “Sita”.

PS. Nina, I have some questions like what the soft you use for it and for Sita, for movie and for sounds to attach. So brilliant synchronization.

What an absolutely brilliant piece. I so agree with the others, a masterpiece, a work of art to be remembered, and the best tell of human history. Nina Paley, you are now immortal (well, as immortal as we humans can ever get). I hope this work lives on a long long time, and soaks into the brains of people everywhere.

Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!

PS I wish you had more sharing options so we can also share it to Twitter, FB, etc.

Hi, Nina. I am a brazilian cartoonist and would like to say that your animation movies are fantastic. You have a so european style that I almost doubted that you were from USA! Nice to see that the country of animation industry can have genious like you… Great job! I’ve shared at AQC SP Facebook page. It’s a Sao Paulo cartoon and comics association. Congratulations!

Dear Nina Paley,
We got the point of your overly simplified, anti-Zionist, sterotypical comic strip, and your critique of the sappy Exodus song, you didn’t have to explain it all. Funny how most Israeli Jews do not think that “God gave this land to me”–funny, too, how most of them (us) are non-religious, and yet you chose to represent us as orthodox, fitting the stereotype of Jews as a religious group, which is erroneous, since most Jews everywhere are non-observant and non-affiliated. Oh, if only we Israelis and Palestinians could be enlightened and beyond nationalism like you Americans, who, by helping to destroy Iraq, have promoted the spread of Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism throughout our region!

Dear Nina Paley,
Your short film has got me into tears – real, unusual, bitter tears. I cannot recall the last time a piece of art affected me so deeply as to that point. For that, I thank you.
The image of civilizations that mount (or found themselves upon) piles of corpses, leading to such unfortunate pessimistic an ending, has only stressed to me the dead-endness we find in the very heart of every realistic analysis of land conflicts around the globe. In a different way, different proportion and with different actors involved, land conflict is also an issue here in Brazil. As brutal, as cruel and just as pointless conflicts, your film could suit us just as well.
In fact, in my point of view (against the apparent common sense that viralized your film as ‘a summary of the Israel-Palestine conflict’, as well as against comments accusing you of simplification and stereotypification), the quality of the film is precisely that it transcends dualities such as good-guys/bad-guys, villains/victims, this/that side of the border. It’s all about a human and humanly tragedy. ‘Human’, because it affects directly the lives of thousands of human beings. ‘Humanly’, because it can only be tackled from within the scope of our humanity.
If art is there to express the unreachable contradictions of the world, and the ultimate paradox of life and death itself, maybe I can appease myself with the optimistic thought that, however sad and pessimistic your film might seem, and probably because of that, it has the power to reach out for people, as it did for me. This is a reason for hope. I guess no one would bother creating a film like this, if they did not have a glimmer of hope of awakening humanity in mankind.
Well, I share your pessimism, but I also share your hope.
Thank you.

Hi Nina, I am not usually an internet commenter but your short animation moved me to do so. It’s great and your other work looks interesting as well (I particularly like your depiction of the angel of death and noticed that you also used it in a piece about the Sader). You’re going to take some shit for this, and probably already have but keep it up!

This video is in accurate and so are your last parts about “Palestinians” living there you have absolutely no clue about the region or the recent history. The jews arrived in the 1800’s, they were athiest secular jewry and palestenians are both jews/arabs who lived in the mandate of palestine.

As with any work of art the vid is selective and aims at appealing to the emotions and common prejudices of those who will find a “good” piece of art. (I don’t).

ALWAYS be suspicious of any work that makes you feel very comfortable in your own choices.

This particular artifact fails in many ways but I will point out one glaring fault: It assumes that there were no Jews in Palestine before European Jews began to arrive there. This is wrong on two counts: First, European Jews had been immigrating to the land of Israel for centuries, in greater or lesser numbers. Second, Sephardic Jews had been inhabiting the land since they became subjects of the Ottomans. The talented artist ignores and/or erases this historical record. The question is why? Is it because she wants to re-inforce a perverted narrative that is not historically correct? I think not. It is more likely that she suffers from the malady of Orientalism, so brilliantly diagnosed by Edward Said. That is, “a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East” in which the Sephardic Jews of Ottoman Palestine simply disappear from the record of a Euro-centric view of the Middle East. Thus, pfft, entire Sephardic communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Jaffa, Haifa, etc become invisible. The only Jews that matter in this vid are the European Jews.

Tsk. Tsk. Remember that what you do to other people’s history can be done to your preferred people’s history.

Loved this land is mine but the british bit is historically inaccurate. We came in ww1 and ww2 to liberate it from Germans. In both cases the locals turned on each other. Still thinking we should come back a third time and kick out all the killers.

[…] can’t there be peace in the Middle East?” In her masterful and stunning animated short, This Land is Mine, Nina Paley knocks that question back with a quick regional history recap. In three and half […]

The Israeli history is not the point in the comic, I suppose (by the way, did you read the Shlomo Sand book “The Invention of the Jewish People”? Very interesting for open minded.)

A fact worthy of attention the Nina Paley’s story underlines: the war is endless just because there are people of different languages/religions/colours that think the same, shameful thing – “I deserve to live (here) and you do not.”

Dear Nina
I watched your film “The land is mine” with great pleasure. From the Jewish point of view, there are a lot of inaccuracies. But his pacifist idea is expressed by means of art simply and clearly: “How long will be a war in the Middle East! What is the end of the conflict”
I did in my website directory “Jewish theme in world cinema” (he’s Russian) I’ll put back annotation to your interest movie with a link to your site. I look forward to your next work, “The execution of the Egyptian firstborn”
A. Margolis. Israel

Hmm. Nina, my suggestion is, don’t spend any more time on this. It doesn’t get the history right, and I fail to see the personal connection. That’s what made “Sita Sings the Blues” brilliant. The personal connection, the working out of the creator’s connection to a very ancient story — that’s where the meat was. This? This is just preachy and tendentious, almost a self-parody in how cookie-cutter it is. And inaccurate, and that’s not beneficial either. Saying “it’s just a cartoon” doesn’t cut it when you are dealing with the history of current events. Also, why the focus on Israel? People have been fighting over land and resources for centuries, everywhere, for all sorts of reasons. So really, since you can’t come up with a genuine artistic vision for this and it simply lends itself to propagandism, why not find something more worthy to spend your time on, something truly artistic?